


Dirt, Earth, and Salt

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Sibling Incest, Threesome - F/M/M, Twincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-21
Updated: 2010-05-21
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:14:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is sixteen and they are fifteen when they find out that they only live four hours from her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirt, Earth, and Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Done for a prompt at the pjo_kinkmeme. Spoilers through The Last Olympian. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/93708.html).

She's sixteen and they're fifteen when they figure out that they only live about four hours away from her (four and a half if you actually drive the speed limit) -- a distance of about three hundred miles.

"You should come visit us!" the twins cry in tandem. They have their feet hooked into the frame of the bed underneath hers, levering them up so their tousled heads appeared on either side of her.

She rolls her eyes, grabs her pillow and smacks the nearest grinning face, because it's creepy when they do that. "Yeah, 'cos my dad will really go for that."

"Come on!" Travis slings the pillow back onto her bunk. "You're old enough to drive."

"Someday, you will learn that there is a difference between taking the truck down to the Shell station and driving to New Mexico."

"Hardly!" the two of them cry again, their voices bird-call sharp in the general jet engine din of the Hermes cabin.

"Maybe," she allows, beating her pillow into shape. Out of the corners of her eyes, she sees them smile, their teeth identical rims of white. "During the school year sometime."

It winds up not mattering, though, because that's the year the lightning bolt goes missing from Olympus.

 

***

Katie remains unclaimed for a solid five years running; she was moved into the Hermes cabin when she showed up the summer she was twelve, and has stayed there ever since.

Everybody knows she's a daughter of Demeter, though. For one, her dad told her. For another, it's kind of hard to miss the fact she acts like Miracle-Gro for anything with a root system and the ability to photosynthesize. The kids in the Apollo cabin can sometimes bend light in times of great stress, but there are only four cabins that have perennial control over the elements: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, and Demeter. Demeter wasn't included in the pact because a) they don't say Big Three for nothing, although "misogynistic" should be included in the title somewhere, and b) her kids are peace-loving by nature and by nurture and tend not to go off war-mongering the way her brothers' kids do. 

However, because Demeter never claimed her, she has to stay with the Hermes cabin, which is ridiculous, because the Demeter cabin only has, like, three kids living in it, and the Hermes cabin could really use her bunk if she moved out, but camp rules are camp rules.

Shortly after she turns seventeen, the Titan threat takes on a new level of serious, and the plow symbol glows a brilliant viridian green above Katie's head.

 

***

She is a slow kind of person -- and not in the way slow means stupid (except for the way in kind of does, as half-bloods are never particularly bookish and the last one to get into an Ivy League school was in, like, 1945,) but more like she takes her time with things. Thinks about things. It's part of what got her elected as the head of the Demeter cabin -- that, and out of the three other members of her cabin, one jumped ship to join Luke and the other two are just thirteen and fourteen, respectively, so it wasn't really much of a choice.

At cabin head meetings, she sits close to the Stoll brothers and listens to the others talk.

After so many years of seeing kids come and go, she's almost made a game out of it: to see if she can figure out where they're from before they tell her.

Most of them she's gotten right: Percy talks with the slap-fast, guard-your-pockets, am-I-loud-enough-yet yodel of a native-born New Yorker, and she pinpointed him pretty much down to his exact borough of birth.

The same satyr that discovered her also brought in Lee Fletcher the same summer. Lee's accent gives nothing away, flat syllables and dropped endings, but when he turns up at camp at the end of May, his skin's so white there isn't even a line left from the summer before, which is strange for an Apollo kid, so she guesses Minnesota or Wisconsin -- he lives a half-hour west of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Michael Yew, in his turn, was wearing a Colorado Springs t-shirt his first day at camp, so he doesn't really count.

Charles Beckendorf, she misjudged. His slow, unhurried drawl reminds her of nothing less than Georgia peaches and sweet tea and the warm seasalt off the Gulf of Mexico, but he's actually from the projects in north Omaha. His mother and Hephaestus bankrupted themselves together on the steel-and-chrome bridges that stretch over the muddy waters of the Missouri, gorgeous and glittering against the riverside flats where Nebraska and Iowa meet.

Silena politely hmms and ohs her way through her sentences and backpedals with every statement almost by default, and for a whole summer, Katie can't decide between Cape Cod and Washington, D.C. Silena's father owns an authentically-restored shop in Old Alexandria, she later learns.

Clarisse puzzles her, insomuch as Katie actually gives a crap, which Clarisse makes it difficult to do -- Demeter kids and Ares kids are Capulets and Montagues, really. Her accent is just big and brass more than it is regional, and she's willing to bet army brat, moved a lot as a kid.

Thalia and Annabeth she mixes up sometimes, because the people of the Pacific coast blur together, toasting progressiveness and cultural fusion, but she works it out: Thalia's smile, when it shows itself, is all Orange County, and Annabeth's got mannerisms native to nowhere but Silicon Valley.

The Stoll brothers are her greatest defeat. She watched them grow-up; frizzy hair fading into a dirty blonde and grins like Shakespearean villains, filling in their shirts at the shoulders in a cornfed way, and for ever and ever, she assumed southern Missouri, maybe Kentucky, or even cowboys from Nashville, even if cowboys were more of an Apollo thing rather than a Hermes thing. Because, _really,_ "Travis" is a fly-over state name. But no. They grew up with the same red dirt and taco trucks that she did.

"Reservation kids," Connor grinned at her, and at her skeptical eyebrow, conceded, "Albeit several generations removed. It's in our eyes, you see --" and he grabbed Travis's face, smashing their cheeks together so that their smiles dimpled into each other. "Don't we look like old souls?"

"You look like trouble," she replied, knee-jerk, and yeah, maybe they're both right: Travis and Connor have flat eyes that slant like a fox's when they grin, dangerously mischievous, but she's also seen their thousand-yard stare, looking out across Luke's invading army, a look like hopelessness has swallowed them from the inside out.

 

***

The politest way to describe Mr. Gardener is to call him a survivalist. Their closest neighbor is a mile off, downhill across dusty footpaths, which is hell on the truck's shocks and impassable after a hard rain, when the white dry rivulets become red silt and mud.

They grow cacti for a living -- her dad goes out before sunrise every morning to tap them for water to supplement what they get from the well: didn't trust the plumbing and wouldn't think of buying bottled water from the store. He sometimes siphons off the excess and sells it to enthusiasts. The sun comes up from behind the field of saguaros, so when she stands at the kitchen sink every morning, she can see nothing but their black silhouettes, thick arms raised skyward. They also grow smaller, more economical potted cacti for the tourists: the kind with miniature sombreros and sunglasses and tiny signs that say, "Hello from Arizona!"

A week before school starts, the September she is nineteen, Katie is woken in the middle of the night by the rumble of an approaching car engine. Her father's wet snores continue undisturbed in the next room, so she rolls off her bedspread, one hand closing around the handle of the shotgun she keeps under the mattress.

The engine cuts out and for a moment there is nothing but deep-still silence. Then her father snores again and one of the chickens they keep out back burbles in her sleep. Almost as an afterthought, Katie lets go of the shotgun long enough to hike a skirt up over her sleep shorts.

When she pushes open the screen door, she is met with the familiar bright-white smiles of the Stoll brothers and a car that should never have made it up the Arizona hills. Travis is behind the wheel and Connor hangs out the passenger side window, arms propped up on the hood of the car.

She lets the shotgun drop, hanging loosely from her right hand the same way she holds a sword or a mace at Camp. She doesn't like shooting things as a general rule, but she hit a coyote from sixty yards off once. Katie's best at hand-to-hand combat, thin sharp legs made for kicking and tripping, but her father's chest swells when he sees her handle a gun with nothing less than natural efficiency.

"What is this?" she asks, waving a hand at the car. It's hard to tell in the light of the single sodium bulb hanging over the porch, but it looks like it has an avocado-green paint job.

"A 1997 El Dorado," Travis says proudly, running his hands over the wheel in a manner very similar to petting.

"A piece of crap," she translates. "Did you steal it?"

"No!" Travis goes, indignant, as Connor says, "Yes."

"... the guy drank his liver away and is in a coma," Travis amends. "He's not going to miss it."

"We wanted to see if you were up for a road trip," Connor adds.

"In the middle of the night?"

"Yes," they say in unison.

"Unless you have somewhere way more pressing to be." Travis cranes his arm back to open the rear door.

Katie looks over her shoulder at the silent house, the chicken coop tucked up close behind it, and beyond it, the mote of the shop, adobe built low to the ground, aluminum sign unlit. She looks back at the twins.

The inside of the car smells like tobacco. An Indian blanket is spread out over the back seat, another one folded up under the rear window. A case of bottled water sits in the footwell behind Connor's seat, underneath nondescript plastic bags with _thank you thank you thank you_ printed down the sides, full of potato chips and breakfast bars and sunscreen.

"Awesome," say the brothers, and the engine turns over with a happy cough. The saguaros stand sentinel in the rearview mirror.

 

***

"What are you going to do with your life, Ms. Gardener?" Connor asks as the sun rises, turning the earth to a russet brown. He's twisted around to face her, the hair at the back of his head flattened down from where it's been resting against the seat. "I mean, now that Olympus is saved."

She knows by now her father will have noticed she's missing. It's an apathetic thought.

"College," is her best answer. "I missed my freshman year last year, staying at Camp to train the younger kids."

"You going to dorm?" Travis has his elbow propped up on the door, the other hand slung low on the wheel. The windows are rolled up against the desert night.

"No, there's a community college about forty-five minutes away. Might save money for grad school, if I find I like being educated," she pronounces 'educated' phonetically, ed-YOU-cated, mocking as she always has, sees them both flash grins. "What about you guys?"

Connor's eyes slide to his brother's profile, and back to her where she lays slanted across the back seat, head pillowed against the door by the second Indian blanket and shotgun laid out across her belly. "We don't really have any plans beyond this."

"I like this plan," she offers, and shields her eyes against the sun.

 

***

By eight-thirty in the morning, they hop off of US-160 and follow the two-lane backroads up to the Four Corners Monument. Katie's legs feel wobbly when she hauls herself out of the backseat, and she listens to the twins stretch, joints popping with satisfied noises. There's nobody else there yet, so they clamber up on top of the monument, which is just a glorified name for a giant stone that sits at the exact spot the state lines of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet to make perfect ninety-degree angles. 

The wrestle in place to see if they can manage to somehow be in all four places at once. It feels a lot like a game of Twister; hands and feet in different states.

"Tell us a secret," Travis goes, as he slides a hand underneath her back to slap it down in New Mexico.

"What?" she laughs, close enough to his face that he looks one-eyed. His breath is morning sour, but she doesn't mind.

"Tell us something about you that nobody else knows."

She shakes her head, hair tumbling loose in Utah. "I don't really have any secrets. I'm not a very exciting person."

"Everyone has secrets," Connor protests, as Travis pipes in, "You're plenty exciting."

She just smiles, and shakes her head again.

After a moment of silence, Connor lowers his butt into Arizona to get more comfortable and offers, "It was us, you know."

"What?"

"Me and Travis. We were the ones that persuaded Mrs. O'Leary to pee on the roof of your cabin last summer. It was actually difficult to pull off," he added, note of relish in his voice at the memory of a challenge. "Since she's a girl hellhound and girl dogs don't really do the leg-lifting thing."

Katie digests this. Then, "Why am I not surprised, of course it was you. You _jerks!_ Do you know how long it took us to get the _smell_ out?"

They both laugh, and she levers a foot against Connor's hip and shoves him into Colorado with all her might.

 

***

At a nearby gas station, Katie studies her reflection in the chrome off of an air pump. She's barefoot, red dirt caked in between her toes and around her nails, the way it will be until the next time she gets to Camp and it has a chance to wash away and stay that way. The hem of her white skirt brushes just past her knees, wrinkled from where she's been laying on it. She's got a print-screen shirt on, an iridescent pattern of feathers and a wolf's profile up her chest, her underarms already dark with sweat, and her earthy brown hair is messy, tied up with a Navajo headband Connor found in the glove compartment. The smell of tobacco off of it is strong enough to make her dizzy.

Travis comes out of the gas station, folding change up into his pocket and carrying a map book in one hand. Shaking off the familiar feeling of dissatisfaction with herself, she heads back to the El Dorado, which is more of a puke-green in the daylight than avocado. 

"Where do you want to go?" Travis asks her as she slides back into the backseat. Weeds have sprung up all around the gas pump, and they stretch out to her longingly as she goes by. Connor's got the book of maps open, their heads bent over it ("want to make sure we don't take another wrong turn in Albuquerque," one says to the other one's grin,) and when Travis turns to face her, he props his chin up on his brother's shoulder.

She folds her legs up, leaning forward to grip the seat in front of her. She doesn't need to look at the map. "That way," she says, and points.

They follow her finger, and she sees the moment it lights up in them, the young American urge to forge ever west, more deeply ingrained in them than Manifest Destiny, tied up close with their god-blood.

 

***

As Arizona falls away, she sleeps. She wakes just the once, slitting her eyelids against the daylight so bright it has no color to it. Connor is tilted sideways in the passenger seat, feet up on the dashboard, and Travis has his arm slung over the console, hand on the back of his twin's neck. His thumb rubs back and forth across the skin, nail just barely grazing the slope of hair at the base of Connor's skull.

 

***

Their breakfast is more of a brunch. There's a stand selling sweet corn off the side of the highway, so they stop. Corn, it turns out, tastes horrible uncooked, and they keep picking strings of husk out of their teeth, giggling helplessly. They wash it down with a Chewy bar and some water.

"Eight times," she says when they're on the road again, before she loses the courage. Travis has a bag of Lays propped open between his thighs, and occasionally he passes a handful back to her.

"Eight times what?" he goes absently.

"You asked me for something nobody else knows. Eight times is the most I've come in one day." It falls from her lips, seemingly too abrupt, and she says "come" as part of regular English vocabulary, sure, but suddenly, it feels like the dirtiest thing she's ever heard uttered. Her heart instantly begins to rabbit in her chest.

The wheel jerks under Travis's hands. "Holy shit," he says, and then immediately, because he can't not, "By yourself, or... ?"

Katie's mouth is too dry to answer. She shakes her head, neither a yes nor a no, smiling at the identical wide-eyed looks aimed at her in the rearview mirror, and goes back to watching the landscape blur into Nevada.

 

***

She's never been on a Quest -- not one of her own, nor has she been on anyone else's. She supposes it's a point of honor for most campers to be able to claim something of the sort, but Katie has never felt she's had anything to prove, and wondered if it was weird of her. Certainly she didn't obsess about it like Luke did.

The Stolls haven't had a Quest, either, but it's different with them. They've already proved their mettle and more, stepping up and putting themselves between Luke and the rest of the Hermes cabin, saying, _no,_ and _we won't let you have them,_ when it would have been easier to give in, let the cabin all follow their leader over to Kronos's side. The largest number of kids in the whole Camp, half of them not even related to them, all diverse, and they kept them together best they could, trained them, got them ready for war. They don't need a Quest.

Up in the front seat, they're murmuring together again, something like, "shouldn't I-15 be coming up soon?" and "no, that's after Vegas," and "godsdamn, I hate having to go around the Grand Canyon. _Stupid national landmarks, ARRGH,"_ and shaking their fists out the window.

Connor's shucked his shoes off, toes curled up so he doesn't leave prints on the windshield. It's so strange, because she sees them for three months every summer, and that's it: that's where the association stops, and it's jarring to have them here, surrounded by the red wastelands that she calls home, the sagebrush and the eerie abandoned adobe villages built into the cliff-face. To her, Travis and Connor belong in New York, where there are swords and monsters and the apocalypse hanging close over their heads, not here, in her every day life.

Strange, maybe, but not uncomfortable, and Katie's the kind of person who slows down and thinks about things, but she didn't take more than a minute before getting in a car with them, so. Maybe.

Maybe.

Her thoughts loop.

 

***

They've almost reached Vegas and the interstate before she makes up her mind, leans forward to say, "hey."

"Hmmm?" the twins reply.

"Hey," she says again, pulls at the seam on the shoulder of Connor's shirt until he's turned around, eyebrows up curiously, and she hooks a hand around the back of his neck -- same place Travis had his earlier -- and pulls him in so she can kiss him over the seatback. 

It's immediately awkward in the way that kissing is always awkward when unexpected, but it clears in a heartbeat; Connor tilts his head, nose hitching up against hers, and opens his mouth, tongue curling in against the furled line of her lips, and she's lost, grabs onto his face and kisses him a second time, or maybe just continues the first, it doesn't matter, because she isn't thinking of anything else except the sensation of it.

"Good?" she asks when she finally pulls back, and they both breathe, _"yes"_ on the same exhale, Connor's mouth spread open and Travis's eyes dark in the rearview.

It's all the encouragement she needs, and her shotgun winds up in the footwell as she hefts herself up, slides up over the console skinny legs first, and with only minimal awkward maneuvering shimmies her way into Connor's lap. She's short enough that she doesn't have to round her back much, her skirt pulled high up on her thighs and her hands planted on the seat on either side of Connor's head. His eyes, up close, are a whole mix of colors, pupils blown so wide the irises are nothing more than a thin chaotic ring.

She casts a quick glance out the windows: it is, after all, a busy time of year with kids heading back to college and early afternoon to boot, and she's not much of an exhibitionist, although she supposes the Stolls might be. When she decides they aren't in immediate danger of passing another car, she twists back around, grins, says, "hey," for a third time.

"Hey," Connor answers, breathless, a look on his face like disbelief and reverence, and pulls her in for another kiss, making it deeper and messier now that they've got a better angle, and the car is filled with the wet, soft, _smack_ sound of mouths sucking at each other.

Breaking away, Katie ducks her head into the space between Connor's cheek and his shoulder, his hair tickling her skin, and gives one low, deliberate roll of her hips, dragging, and can't help the noise she makes when she feels him through the layer of her sleep shorts and her underwear, hot and hard and pressing against the zipper of his jeans. She snaps her hips again on instinct, and feels rather than sees Connor's head fall back, a bitten-off sound catching in his chest.

"Oh, _holy_ fucking --" comes strangled from the driver's seat, and she sees Travis's hand stretch out for them in her peripheral vision.

She slaps it away, going, "Uh-uh. Drive," with what she considers to be elegant coherency.

Travis groans in frustration, eyes landing back on the road, before sliding inexorably to them again. She settles lower into the cradle of Connor's hips, feeling his hands skate restlessly up and down her flanks, senseless little touches that ricochet everywhere underneath her skin and are driving her nuts.

"Nipples," she hears Travis say distinctly.

Perplexed, she lifts her head to answer in kind, "Cheesecake."

"No." He takes his hand off the wheel to make a half-aborted gesture towards them, then forcibly swallows and puts it back, saying hoarsely, "He likes it when you play with his nipples."

Connor shoots him a look that is comically betrayed, all wide-eyed _how could you,_ but Katie's already clawing at the hem of his shirt, pulling up around his armpits, commenting, "I thought guy's nipples weren't really that sensitive."

"Depends on who's touching them," Travis answers, eyelashes flicking and catching in the sunlight as he looks back and forth between them and the highway, too rapidly to give much credence to his cool tone.

Katie hmms low in her throat, and, experimentally, rakes her nails down the Connor's chest, catching on his nipples and skittering down his ribs. His inhale stutters into him, and she puts them back, rubbing the pads of her fingers into his nipples. It makes her feel slightly ridiculous, but only for a second or two, because Connor makes this _noise,_ part-squeak, part-groan, part-gasp that sends a flush of heat all the way down her belly, turns her throat to sawdust.

His spine arches, pushing up into her unmistakably, and Katie hisses, hurriedly debating the merit of stripping out of her shorts and underwear here, on the highway, when they could pass anyone at any time.

Connor makes the decision for her, letting go of her hip and reaching out to his brother, the most instinctive and natural of movements, and his voice is little more than a pant when he says, "Pull over. Anywhere."

 

***

They make her come twice in the span of forty minutes.

She listens to them kiss, afterwards, slow animalistic sounds of tongues sliding open-mouthed and lazy, familiar, like it's something they've always done, and after a moment, they break apart to murmur to each other in hummed half-sentences, not needing much more than a few words to be understood by the other. She knows what they sound like when they're planning something.

She opens her eyes and glances at the dashboard clock, sees how much of the day they have left, and grins.

The Stoll brothers always did like breaking records.

She flips back over in the narrow backseat space, reaching for them, the long, dark lines of them, bright matching eyes, their wet smiling mouths and sex-mussed hair, wisps of blonde everywhere, all self-consciousness gone from her voice as she goes, low, throaty, _come here._

 

***

At a scenic overlook on the PCH, hours or days later, it doesn't matter, Connor tugs her in until she's pressed between them, warm solid weight on either side. The ocean's below them, and she thinks of asking them all kinds of things, like if they're going to be on the road much longer, they should get changes of clothing somewhere, do twins have different favorite colors, what their Native American names are, and when do they want to eat, but it doesn't really seem like the kind of silence she wants to break.

After awhile, Travis shifts, fingers tightening on her hip for a beat before he murmurs, voice deep like the inside of a saguaro, "There's a community college near where we live, too, you know."

She smiles, and tucks her head into his shoulder.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
